


Doctors Make the Second Worst Patients

by covertius



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Caretaking, Dr. Damen, Hurt/Comfort, Injured Stranger Laurent, M/M, allusions to laurent's uncle, description of minor injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22321666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/covertius/pseuds/covertius
Summary: When someone else's stupidity causes Laurent to get into a bicycle accident, he refuses to go to the hospital and winds up being taken home by a good Samaritan to see to his injuries.  When his head clears, he'll probably have thoughts about being in a strange man's apartment, but until then, letting a handsome and caring doctor clean him up and tend to his wounds isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to him.Not by a long shot.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 52
Kudos: 323
Collections: Captive Prince Reverse Bang 2019





	Doctors Make the Second Worst Patients

**Author's Note:**

> Based on art by the lovely @liebremaga. You can check out her tumblr here: https://liebremaga.tumblr.com/

When Laurent needed to clear his head, there were few things he liked better than to take his bike along the Hudson River Greenway and just ride until his troubles faded into the background. It was three miles each way up and down the edge of Manhattan, the skyline on one side and Jersey on the other, right on the edge of the river. The rush of air as he sped past blended with the wind coming off the water, the noise of the traffic and the cries of hungry gulls, the strange smells of the city and the stranger smells of a healthy brackish ecosystem as it rebounded after clean-up efforts, the green of the landscaped trees in the little strip of park he rode through and the deeper green of the taller ones across the river, the Palisades cliffs when he was far enough uptown to glimpse them in the distance and the equally soaring skyscrapers downtown that matched them - it all melded together into a series of impressions stronger than language that overwhelmed his brooding thoughts with silent understanding. Or at least, biking as fast as he could up and down the trail several times exhausted him too badly to think anymore.

He found himself there early on a Saturday afternoon, after a night broken by bad dreams that he couldn’t quite remember led to sleeping late and a listless morning where he felt not so much tired but _off_. But the biking helped. His head was already mostly cleared by the time he’d gone as far as he could in one direction, turned back, and overshot his starting point to the end of the trail at the other. As he turned again and started his third trek along the bike path, he felt more alert and focused than he had all day, aware of the muscles in his body moving with sure purpose, propelling him where he wanted to go. Soon, he was no longer trying to distract himself from whatever had troubled his sleep and was simply enjoying his ride, the sights and sounds and the feeling of movement.

That is, until some slack-jawed tourist coming off the ferry didn’t notice the bike crossing signs and stepped right into Laurent’s path without even looking.

The small child holding their hand made him swerve sharply to avoid them, and the next thing he knew was a clang and a ringing pain, and he was somehow half on his bike and half on the ground, and tangled into a compromising position with a signpost.

“Are you OK?” said a voice, suddenly very close to his ear, and Laurent became aware of a warm hand cupping his cheek. Time had passed before this moment. Laurent could tell, because his knee was already cold from prolonged contact with the ground (which would not have happened right away), and he had a vague echoey memory of the same voice that was speaking to him now saying something like, “Let me through, I’m a doctor.” But everything between being upright on the bicycle being brought back to awareness by the touch was distressingly vague.

The man tilted Laurent’s head until all he could see his wide round face, olive skin and warm brown eyes and a tumble of black curls.

“Do you know who you are?”

Laurent only realized there was a crowd around them when it dissipated. People who lived outside the city often thought that New Yorkers wouldn’t stop to help each other, but that wasn’t quite the case. It was true, however, that most of them didn’t gawk - once they saw that someone was helping him, the rest of them went about their business.

His head hurt. “Laurent deVere.”

He next told the stranger how old he was, what day it was, where they were, and how he had been injured: “An idiot who never should have procreated led their child in front of traffic and I nearly killed myself trying to keep their unworthy selves from being taken out of the gene pool.”

The stranger had a dimple when he smiled.

“No severe concussion then, but the hospital should probably check you out just in case-”

“No hospitals.”

The stranger ran his fingers down Laurent’s jaw until he found the chinstrap, unstrapping it with a click and gently removing Laurent’s helmet. He held it out before him and at first Laurent wasn’t sure what he was being shown until he noticed the shallow depression in its formally smooth surface, probably where Laurent’s head had collided with the pole. No wonder it hurt.

“Hospital.”

Images clashed in Laurent’s mind - a routine procedure, groggy in a hospital bed, hand in his hair stroking gently, instinctively turning towards the comfort until a voice Laurent had viciously removed from his emergency contact but not replaced with anyone else, who must somewhere, deep in some outdated paperwork, still be down as next of kin said with false warmth, _Laurent, my dear boy..._

He braced himself against the stranger’s arm and physically stopped himself from being sick.

_“No hospitals.”_

“Alright, if you’re going to be stubborn, I can finish the exam myself. You OK to move?”

“Yes, I’m fine-” Laurent tried to stand up and was immediately felled by a shooting pain in his ankle.

The stranger crouched down now, examining Laurent’s foot and making it hurt more as he moved it around and put gentle pressure on the joint.

“Sprained,” he pronounced.

“I could have told you that,” said Laurent, thinking of what he now remembered about the way his ankle had twisted beneath him as the bike went down.

“If you put your arm around my shoulder, do you think you can move without putting weight on it? It’s not far.”

The stranger stood up. He stood _very_ up. Laurent hadn’t realized that he had been rescued by a giant.

“I can manage,” he said, throat suddenly dry.

The stranger took his bike and helmet in one hand and helped Laurent up with the other.

“I’m Damen,” he said, as they started down the path in a very slow parody of a three-legged race. The bike had a bent front wheel now that wobbled, but Damen was holding it slightly off the ground so all its weight rested on the undamaged back wheel, and it rolled along smoothly.

“Charmed.” It took a lot of concentration to keep his foot up, to continue hopping on the leg that wasn’t injured. “I would tell you mine, but you asked already.”

His head still hurt, and he felt nauseated. He was leaning on the stranger, who was shouldering his weight amicably. The stranger smelled good.

“You seem pretty with it,” he said, “But I’m still gonna give you three words to remember, and I want to see if you can repeat them back to me in five minutes: Watermelon. Lion. Epiphany.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t be evaluating you for stroke?”

“Laurent.”

“Watermelon, lion, epiphany. And I repeat them back to you in five minutes to prove that I don’t need hospitalization.”

They crossed the street and came to a building that looked like it had once been some sort of warehouse or factory structure before it was converted into apartments. Damen wheeled his bike into a wide elevator with just enough distressing to show that it had once been meant for freight, and it wasn’t until the doors closed that Laurent realized that he was letting a strange man take him back to his apartment. He knew that his rescuer was a doctor. He could have thought that he was being taken back to his office, or to a nearby urgent care. He have been surprised when their destination turned out to be a residential building; could have protested when they were still in the lobby, or out on the sidewalk. But none of that had happened. He hadn’t thought about where they were going at all. Damen had asked him if he could move, and then Laurent had gone with him without giving any thought at all to where he was being taken, and that suddenly frightened him more than being alone in an elevator with a taller, stronger, uninjured strange man.

He must have hit his head harder than he thought.

“When was your last tetanus shot?” Damen asked, as they stepped out of the elevator and he started unlocking a door. Laurent had come this far and Damen still had his bike, so he followed him in to a spacious apartment with windows that faced 12th Avenue and the Hudson River beyond.

“Is that one of your regular concussion questions?” he asked, masking his sudden awareness of vulnerability with sarcasm. “How often do people know that one?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“No I’m not-” Laurent looked down at his body and saw a patch of red blooming and widening around a tear in his shirt moments before he became conscious of a stinging pain in his shoulder. “Why am I bleeding?”

“I’m hoping you got cut on a corner of the sign - anything thicker than that and it’s going to be nasty when we get a look under there. Tetanus?”

“Last June.” His landlord had torn up the carpet and resanded the hardwood as a condition of Laurent moving in, and neither of them had noticed the stray nail.

Damen made a considering noise. “That should be good enough, as long as it’s not too deep.” 

The pain sharpened as Damen tugged his shirt aside. “Doesn’t look too bad.” He stowed Laurent’s bike against a bare wall, letting the damaged helmet hang off the handlebars. “Concussion assessment first.”

Laurent looked around the apartment as Damen asked him symptom questions (“Yes” to headache; nausea present but fading; “no” to numbness, fatigue, and double-vision), taking in the wide space and minimalist furnishings, wide double widows leading to a balcony with one potted plant on the railing.

“So you’re loaded,” Laurent said conversationally, as Damen got out a tiny flashlight and shined it in his eyes for light sensitivity.

“So are you,” Damen said, absently gesturing at the bike as he continued his tests. It was top of the line and probably more expensive than Laurent needed, which he wasn’t going to make excuses for - he could afford it. He was, though, mildly surprised that Damen had recognized it as such.

“Very mild concussion,” diagnosed Dr. Damen. “You should take the next couple of days off to rest your brain and avoid any strenuous physical or mental activity, plus anything that involves eye movement like watching TV or reading.”

Laurent looked at him flatly. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

“If it was worse, I’d tell you to lie in a dark room and wait for your head to stop hurting, but you should be OK with mild activity like listening to podcasts or catching up on your laundry. As long as you stop if it starts bothering you and contact your doctor if your symptoms get any worse.”

Laurent nodded. His laundry was taken by a service, but he could download a few things on audiobook.

“Do I need to be careful about sleeping?”

“If you have a friend who’s close enough, having them wake you every couple of hours to check that you keep waking normally is not a bad idea, but it’s more of a precaution than a necessity. You don’t have to avoid falling asleep.”

Damen walked into another room and came back with a bottle of water, over-the-counter pain meds, and a first aid kit. He glanced at the label of the pain meds and handed them and the water bottle to Laurent.

“Take two of those for your headache.” He opened the first aid kit and started rummaging around.

Laurent sat unmoving. “You looked at the front of the bottle, not the back.”

“I know the adult dosage for acetaminophen,” Damen said, as if he was mildly insulted that Laurent would think otherwise, “I was checking how many milligrams were in each capelet.”

Laurent gave him an unimpressed look.

Dame took the bottle from him and popped two. “See, not poisoned.” He grinned. “All the beautiful young men I lure back here, I kill with the axe in my closet.”

Laurent rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t deny the hint of warmth that was creeping up his cheekbones. Damen was a large man, but he was also an attractive one, well-proportioned to his bulk and with a classically handsome face, from the Caravaggio-curls to the large brown eyes, right down to the cleft in his chin. A smile that smug on a face so warm and open … Laurent was not immune.

His head did hurt. He swallowed the pills while Damen laid out what he needed from the first aid kit.

Then Damen was leaning over him, bending down into his space to examine his shoulder. In the new position, he was more conscious of their size difference han he had been before - how much Damen loomed over him, the sheer expanse of muscles contained in his broad shoulders. Something woozy settled in his stomach that was not entirely unpleasant. Not entirely.

With incongruous gentleness, Damen plucked at Laurent’s shirt with big fingers, pulling the fabric away from the cut underneath that it clung to with a sticky resistance. 

“This is ruined anyway,” he murmured under his breath. Then he grabbed the material with both hands and ripped the shirt in half with one sharp tug.

Laurent’s hand flashed to his waist and up again, and Damen’s eyes widened comically when he saw that there was now a flicked-open pocket knife levelled against his neck.

“I don’t allow strange men to rip off my clothing.”

“I was just trying to - where were you even keeping that?”

Laurent didn’t dignify that with a response.

“OK look, I understand that that was shocking and I should have given you more warning.” Damen had raised his hands up by his face, open and palms forward in a symbol of _I mean no harm_. “But the shirt was both torn and stained already, and I thought it was better to get it off that way than to make you lift your arms up to try to get it off over your head-”

Damen lunged forward suddenly, wrapping his hand around Laurent’s wrist before he could react. Laurent struggled, and for a moment it seemed that Damen was surprised by that, and by the strength in his arm. But Laurent was smaller and wounded and already in pain. His torn shoulder burned as he moved and his head throbbed. Damen started squeezing his wrist, slowly increasing the pressure to try to make his hand open, and Laurent could not see any way of winning this fight, but he did foresee the possibility of leaving here with a fourth injury if he fought back hard enough that Damen had to hurt him to disarm him.

He dropped the knife.

“Did that make you feel like a big strong man, overpowering an injured person?”

“You pulled a knife on me!”

“And?” he said, as if there were nothing wrong with that.

It was the kind of insouciance that made people want to hit him, and for a second the look on Damen’s face showed that that was the exact effect he had achieved. But it was only for a second. Then Damen shook his head with a little half-smile that looked almost admiring of his gall.

“You took me back to your apartment and tore my clothes off.”

“That was for practical reasons only. And you came willingly.”

“As we were just discussing, I have a head injury. I was not making the clearest decisions.”

A look of discomfort passed over Damen’s face. “Now I almost feel bad about taking your knife away.”

Laurent held out his hand expectantly.

“I’m not going to give it back,” Damen said, and he placed it on an end table behind him where Laurent would have to get past him to reach it. Its absence made him feel more vulnerable and exposed than the tattered remains of his shirt - Auguste had told him it was important to be able to defend himself wherever he went, and showed him how to keep a pocket knife somewhere he could always reach it and get it out quickly when he needed to. They had practiced in the backyard like a game, trying to be the quickest draw. He always kept one on him now.

“But if you really feel unsafe, you can have this.” He got out his wallet and handed Laurent a card.

“What exactly do you expect me to do with your driver’s license? Sharpen it down to a fine edge and slash your carotid artery?”

“Take a picture of my details and send it to someone. Then if anything happens to you, I’d be top suspect immediately. I wouldn’t take that risk.”

Laurent had no one to send the picture to, but he took his phone out of the zippered pocket of his exercise leggings and snapped a few pictures anyway. His host’s full name was Damianos Akielopoulos, he was five years older than Laurent, and he was one of the few people Laurent had met besides himself who looked good in government ID pictures. He did look good. He also, with the mandate not to smile, looked more intimidating than he did in person - no warm friendliness to distract you from the power and strength in his eyes and in the strong lines of his symmetrical face. He looked like the sort of man you definitely didn’t want to pull a knife on, and Laurent felt a belated rush of relief that that had ended with the knife in full sight across the room and Laurent no less unharmed than he had been before.

“May I?” said the giant, gesturing to Laurent’s shirt.

“Astonishing. He’s learnt to ask.”

Laurent allowed Damen to ease the torn shirt gingerly off his shoulders (which was, in fact, much easier than getting it over his head would have been, though Laurent would never admit it).

“This might sting a little.” While Laurent had been examining the license, Damen had gone into the bathroom and come back with a cloth of warm water that he now dabbed gently at Laurent’s shoulder, cleaning away the tacky mess so he could see what he was working with. Bent down like that, their bodies were close together. Laurent found himself staring at the top of Damen’s head, able to count all the hairs in his curls and watch the lines in his forehead flicker deep and smooth as he worked. A drop of rapidly cooling water trickled down his chest, and Laurent forced his body to relax, effortfully keeping it from tensing. The apartment wasn’t cold, but the air chilled rapidly on his exposed skin, and he was conscious of the body heat coming from Damen’s limbs, close enough to feel it.

“It’s long, but not deep - not as bad as it might have been,” Damen said, finally leaning back out of Laurent’s space. He poured clear alcohol from a plastic bottle onto a square of white cotton. “Now this is _definitely_ going to sting.”

It did. But Laurent was used to pain - that didn’t bother him nearly as much as continuing to sit there half-naked in a strange man’s apartment, without even the scraps of torn fabric that had once been his exercise shirt to pretend at modesty. The pain was sharp, focusing. In comparison, he almost found it reassuring.

Laurent was a master of schooling his features, but something must have shown regardless, because there came a moment when Damen glanced up at him and his own open features changed as if in sudden understanding.

“Hold this here a minute.”

Damen opened a door on what Laurent could see was a dimly lit bedroom and came back with a green button-up.

“This belonged to an old boyfriend, so hopefully it won’t be stupid-big.” He held it up so that Laurent could get his arms through one at a time, trading off the hand that was holding the pad over the cut.

Laurent was absolutely swimming in it.

This was ridiculous. He was not even a small man. He had a somewhat lean build, but he was average height, and closer to muscular than skinny. He worked out.

“Do you have some kind of weird rule that you only date men who are as comically oversized as you?” Laurent’s eyes narrowed. “Do you like being the small one?”

“I had a good inch on him.” Damen was working on the buttons, starting from the bottom and working his way up while Laurent put pressure on his cut. He flashed a smile. “More where it counted.”

Laurent rolled his eyes.

“Actually, now that I see it, that wasn’t my last boyfriend’s shirt after all. He was smaller than you. This one belonged to a one-night stand.”

“And he just happened to leave his shirt behind?”

“We met at an amateur wrestling tournament. He brought his gym bag over and left in his sweats. He must not have noticed he’d forgotten this.”

Damen left the shirt open somewhere around the middle, pulled open over the shoulder so he could get at the wound. He had been nothing but professional when Laurent was entirely shirtless, but something started changing as he reached the last few buttons - the act of doing them up too tender and intimate, perhaps, or talking about his past lovers. Perhaps he was remembering undoing these same buttons, tossing this shirt on the floor. On the last few his fingers fumbled, and he kept looking at Laurent’s chest and then away. His cheeks were growing pink.

He took Laurent’s hand away with surprising gentleness and started tending to the cut, drawing a long line of antibacterial gel over it and then fixing a sterile pad in place with white tape. His previously sure fingers continued to be timid, flinching away when they made warm contact with his skin, and Laurent was enjoying his discomfort.

“I would have thought you would have had ex- _girl_ friends,” Laurent said, looking directly at Damen’s face as Damen pretended not to notice and maintained eye contact with his shoulder.

“What makes you say that?”

“Giving me your license, to make me feel safe. Seems like the kind of thing a man who dates women would do.”

“I’m equal opportunity.” Damen forgot himself enough to flash another grin, making it more of a flirtation than a way to avoid saying “bisexual.”

“What about you?” he asked, taping the final seam in place, “are you ‘a man who dates women?’”

“I don’t date anybody.” Laurent took the opportunity to look Damen up and down, being just a little obvious. “Mostly.”

It earned him another flush.

“For the ankle, I think it would be easier if you get on the table.” Damen raised his hands as if he would put them about Laurent’s waist. “Need a boost?”

“No,” Laurent said coldly, but he did grab Damen’s raised elbows to brace himself as he hopped onto the surface of the dining table. His hands were free now and there was no need to get to his shoulder, but he intentionally left his shirt open as Damen had had it, still dragged down over one arm. He drew one knee up and reposed as if he were relaxing at home, perhaps a prince enjoying the attention of a vassal with rare permission to touch the royal foot, not an injured man receiving medical attention.

He knew exactly how infuriating this attitude of his could be, but Damen knelt without comment, gently palpating the joint again as if to gauge where the swelling was. The whole ankle was hot and inflamed, but somehow Damen’s hands still felt warm against his skin.

He started wrapping the joint, carefully winding the bandage around and around Laurent’s bare foot. Laurent was struck again by the contrast - a man so big, so strong, so frightening when he had wrenched the knife from Laurent’s grasp, so obviously capable of causing pain, and yet so gentle with Laurent. He wondered what kind of doctor he was - if within those large hands was the precision of a neurosurgeon or the tenderness of a pediatrician. Either seemed more likely than it had before he’d cupped Laurent’s instep with powerful grace.

“Words?” Damen said, as he started slowly manipulating Laurent’s foot to see how it moved in the bandages.

“That’s way longer than five minutes.”

“Words,” Damen said again.

“Watermelon. Lion.” Laurent looked down at the top of Damen’s head, at the crown of it, at how it looked to have him kneeling at Laurent’s feet. He was heady with it. “Epiphany.”

“That should do it,” Damen said looking up, though he still had both hands on Laurent’s foot. “Unless there’s another injury somewhere I should know about?”

“I seem to have managed to get away with only three.”

“Better three mild than one severe,” Damen said, and though Laurent was sure that was right, he still greeted that with the disdain it deserved.

“Lucky me.”

Damen stood and offered his hand, and this time Laurent did take it as he let himself down from the table.

“Can you move around well enough to get yourself home?”

Laurent tested it gingerly, still gripping Damen’s hand as he moved around without putting weight on his wrapped ankle and then a few more steps carefully trying it.

“If I lean on the bike, I should be able to make it from here to a cab and from a cab to my apartment.”

Damen wheeled the bike over so that he could make the attempt. The bent front wheel did wobble as it turned, but not enough to prevent it from moving or make it so unsteady that Laurent was in danger of falling from leaning on it. It should be fine for short distances as long as he maintained control.

“You have fare?”

Even when exercising, Laurent never left home without his ID, a debit card, and a slim number of bills in the pocket of his fold-over phone case, and the apartment key zipped into a pocket in his athletic shoe.

“Yes,” said Laurent, declining to explain where.

“I’ll give you my card,” said Damen, and he scrounged around in the drawer of an end table for a pen before scribbling what was probably his personal cell phone number on the back of one. “Watch for your head pain getting worse or for any disorientation or vision changes, and for redness and swelling around your ankle and shoulder. If anything gets worse, or you have any problems, call me.”

Laurent slipped the white card into the pocket of his leggings, feeling the corners dig into his thigh as Damen’s eyes followed the progress of his fingers.

“Trade?”

Damen held out the pocket knife and Laurent tapped his license thoughtfully against his hip.

“I don’t know. I’ve never committed identity theft before, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be too hard.” He gave Damen a slow look. “Especially not when some idiot makes it this easy.”

Damen held out his palm and made a “gimme” gesture. He frowned from his lips to his eyebrows, taking up his whole face. Laurent found it amusing.

He dropped the card into Damen’s waiting palm, letting his fingers gently brush against skin to see if Damen would flush. He did.

Laurent smiled. “After all, I still have the pictures,” he said, stowing his pocket knife back where it had been before.

Damen frowned again. “I’m going to have to put a credit freeze on my account, aren’t I?”

“If you’re offering that to any Tinder date who’s nervous about going home with you, you should have done that already,” Laurent said sanctimoniously. It would do Damen a favor, really, if he applied for a credit card in his name. Teach him a valuable lesson.

Shaking his head, Damen helped him tie his shoelaces into a knot so he could hang his removed sneaker off the handlebars instead of having to carry it.

“Let me walk you down.”

“I’ll manage.”

Damen accepted that and waved him goodbye as the elevator doors closed, but they weren’t fully shut before Laurent started regretting it. The once-freight elevator, with its glass walls displaying the exposed brick of the shaft and edison light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, felt oddly vast without the mountain of a man he had come up in it with. Empty. Lonely.

Limping his way onto 12th Avenue, where pedestrians moved around him without complaint but no one offered to help, also felt lonely, and the feeling persisted as he stepped out into the street and glared down yellowcabs until one of them responded to his raised thumb even with the extra hassle of the bike. Damen had been in his space in one way or another all afternoon, and he missed the spicy soap-sharp smell of him, and the warmth emanating from his bulk. He missed having something nice to look at who could talk back to him when Laurent deserved it and offer comfort in his sure, steady voice when Laurent did not. Somewhere in that afternoon, Damen’s size and muscles looming over him had started to feel safe.

He was still thinking about it as he settled in on his couch, cab driver paid and bike stowed away, with a mug of hot chocolate he had managed to make without irritating either his foot or his head too much. He stretched out next to the coffee table with its forbidden pile of books, in clear view of the equally forbidden flatscreen television, and pulled a blanket over his legs. In the boredom of trying to decide which book he wanted to download and listen to without being able to spend enough time looking at a screen to do something helpful like scroll through a list on his phone, his mind drifted kept drifting back to earlier. He was tired and vaguely woozy and his head still ached with a dull pain that the pain relievers couldn’t quite removed. He had the childish thought that he wanted someone taking care of him, but instead of longing for his mother or Auguste, he found himself thinking back to his ankle and how it had felt to be wrapped up so tightly, hands touching him so gently and carefully. The good doctor on his knees.

Laurent risked focusing his eyes long enough to copy the number from the back of the card and use speech-to-text send a quick, _This is Laurent_ text.

 _Something’s wrong already?_ _  
__If it’s getting worse so quickly, you should probably have someone get you to a hospital, or at least an urgent care._

_Why would it be worse?_

_You just wanted to check the number?_

_No. You said I could text you if I had any_ _problems._

There was a pause. Laurent leaned back and felt a rush of dizziness that he wasn’t sure came from the screen reading with his mild concussion or nerves about what Damen was going to say.

_What problem do you have?_

_I don't have anyone to have dinner to have dinner with._

Laurent smiled. On the other end of the phone, he could picture Damen smiling too as the reply came through.

_I think I can fix that._

_Good._ Laurent texted his address. _And bring me take-out when you come; I am injured and concussed._

 _That’s a shame, I normally make all my injured and concussed dates cook for me._ _  
__What kind of take-out do you want?_

Laurent thought. He wanted something warm and filling, with carbs and protein to help his body heal.

 _Chicken Pad Thai. Mild._ _  
__There’s a place called Thai Palace right by the nearest subway stop that’s very good. Do_ not _go to Thai Orchid_ _  
__And you can get whatever you want for yourself_

 _Thank you for the permission._ _  
__And would his highness like to split a steamed dumpling appetizer?_

Laurent felt his grin widening.

_That would be acceptable._

**Author's Note:**

> Links to full-sized artwork:
> 
> https://liebremaga.tumblr.com/post/190348761510/dr-damen-au-for-the-capri-bigbang2k19-you-can
> 
> https://66.media.tumblr.com/03d453743e41e27711617e752f0f65bd/47646ae562a5aab7-92/s540x810/fa72bd1795d8ac70c9cf1559a8972ad03ac5d3ec.png
> 
> https://66.media.tumblr.com/8eefc005add092c6e9a070b2008dbc13/47646ae562a5aab7-ee/s1280x1920/7e392dc2004582191fc99eb35776d387886c5e62.png


End file.
